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Welcome to the online version of Compass Points, the magazine of the Cave Surveying Group. Compass Points is no longer published in paper form.

It is hoped that this will develop into a resource for research and training articles on Cave Surveying as well as a newsletter for Cave Surveying Group members and indeed the general caving public.

Articles are invited from anyone who cares to put pen to paper or, to be more correct, fingers to keyboard. Submitted articles will be reviewed by moderators and, if considered suitable, will be published here.

Geographical Information Systems are now used for all sorts of purposes from town planning to epidemic monitoring.

GPS receivers are used extensively these days for recording the location of cave entrances. These data can be exported as a gpx file which can be opened in Google Earth. These will show as a waypoint or a Placemark as it's known in Google Earth. This is the simplest form of georeferencing. The points show on a map of the world and each point can be given a name and can have a symol assigned to it.

This second article will cover the steps I used in a recent project to produce a GIS map of the caves of the Peak District, from collecting and modifying the location data for the caves to creating contours for the area covered. It is not intended as a tutorial for QGIS although it may be used as such. Better tutorials are available on the internet.